📍 University Circle

Interpreting Sita’s Abduction in Early Indian Art

 

Start: May 3, 2026 2:00 pm
End: May 3, 2026 3:00 pm

Cleveland Museum of Art
Address:
11150 East Blvd.
Cleveland, OH – 44106-1797

Admission Price: Free

Speaker: Naman Parmeshwar Ahuja, Professor of Indian Art and Architecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Surprisingly, the earliest depictions of the dramatic scene of Sita’s abduction in the Rāmāyaṇa, a fundamentally Hindu text, are found rather in early Buddhist contexts ranging from 200 BCE to 200 CE. Besides sculptures and other archaeological finds, versions of this story also appear in ancient Buddhist and Jain texts from different regions, written in languages such as Prakrit, Pali, and Chinese. Does this suggest that ancient religious identities were more flexible than previously thought? Additionally, the prevalence of Sita’s abduction shows that stories about the abduction of women were very popular. Does this reflect how society at the time normalized a patriarchal view of desire? Naman P. Ahuja is a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, specializing in South Asia’s art history. He is the general editor of Marg and a curator who, through his numerous publications and exhibitions, has drawn attention to the foundations of Indian visual iconography and aesthetics, the simultaneous demands of decolonization and transculturalism as well as matters of gender and religious culture.

 

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